Compaq Portable III rises again for a noble cause

[Autuin] found a Compaq Portable III destined for the scrap bin at Free Geek Vancouver. Upon seeing it he realized that it could still fight; fight against the tyranny of hipsters and their shiny Macbook Pros at his local coffee shop. Unfortunately, being a 286, the computer couldn’t do much. He could take the usual route; which is to remove all the internals, and use the vast amount of space to fit a more modern computer inside. However, he decided to go a different path and save the internals, leaving it in original working order. The computer didn’t have enough power to browse the web, but it had just enough room to fit a small single-board computer inside; to which he could connect through serial. He hasn’t taken it down to the coffee shop yet, but we’re hoping for a few horrified hipsters and a full mission report when he does.

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35 thoughts on “Compaq Portable III rises again for a noble cause”

Are you sure that an 80286 isn’t powerful enough to browse the web, when web browsers exist for the humble 6502? OK, they lack Javascript support, but to suggest the 286 isn’t “powerful enough” to browse the web is a bit disingenuous.

I think you meant to write, “The 80286 isn’t fast enough to support today’s web applications.” That is both more correct and less inflammatory.

If you turn graphics off (for speed) Arachne will run on a ‘286 just fine. It wants: DOS and a modem.

I don’t know what would be required for a modern smartphone (other than incredible amounts of irony) but older phones typically had “serial port” pins on the chunky bottom connector if someone wanted to use that Compaq portable with wireless internet!

Humm. Can you run X11 on freedos?
Also just for fun you could replace hard driver with a CF card and possibly fit something like a Beagle board or Gumstix in the space where the old hard drive was. Get X11 running and you could have WiFi and Bluetooth.

And boy do I like that machine… That screen is amazing. I remember looking at network analyzer computers, which have a similar form factor, and the same sort of screen. It’s nice to know there’s a general purpose machine of that style.

I really like the idea of putting a more powerful SBC in there. I may have to try my own take on this.

i’ve got an original 8088 compaq portable (look them up, they are way cooler than this), and what i did with that was take a WRT54G and install dd-wrt, and mounted it inside the compaq, powering it from the 5 volt rail from one of the molex connectors.

i use an NE1000 ISA ethernet card, and it’s connected to the router.. and of course, i have a DOS telnet client so basically the portable just acts a terminal to a moderately powerful wireless-capable ARM linux box.

Hey all — glad you enjoyed the hack. miker00lz, I had one of those too and would love to put one together an older brother for the Portable III; the original portable has a standard Hercules display, so I’d probably tear out the old computer entirely. But yes, I thought about using OpenWRT for this but didn’t have a spare router lying around.

macegr, yeah, a friend of mine already pointed that out. What instead? Take it to a job interview?

Munch: True. What I probably meant is “I want it to run Linux.”

Regarding VNC and the like, it’s possible, but over a 286’s 8250-based serial port it would be horrendous.

vmspionage: No, unfortunately. There’s a non-standard ribbon cable (20 pins OTOH) between the display controller and the plasma panel, and a non-standard bus interface between the motherboard and the display controller. And of course the display controller is non-standard too. The whole thing resembles CGA from the software side, but supposedly offers a non-standard 640×400 monochrome mode.

Haha that’s great…I’m from Vancouver so I know first hand the threat that hipters pose! I’ve always wanted to lug an old Macintosh Classic into a coffee shop and start playing some Oregon Trail…and sip my latte, of course!

HeyAllen, thanks for the offer, but I can probably scare them up from Free Geek Vancouver for less than the cost of shipping. (If you’re not familiar with the Free Geek concept, google it up. It’s awesome and there might be one near you.) I’ve got a couple fun OpenWRT projects I’ll blog about soon. Thanks, though!

I agree: The reason why the proud owner will crush all the Hipsters and reduce them to tears is that all their carefully selected accessories are fly-shit in comparison to the crown-jewel belonging to the Hipster King.

There should be a national day for this and flash mob a Starbucks at a Barnes and nobles with old pc’s like my Olivetti portable. or be really funny and take a apple newton and a apple 2c and setup shop talk about strange looks.

Nice! I inherited a Compaq Portable PCIII a while ago, which turned out to have had its original guts replaced with a Tyan S1590S Trinity Super7 mobo running a Cyrix K6-2 CPU. I swapped the 3.5″ HDD for a 2.5″ and added a USB 2.0 and wi-fi card, then installed Win 98SE and managed to get onto Facebook:

I also had a blast playing Prince of Persia, Keen, Megablast, Dune2, etc and running Impulse Tracker and watching a bunch of old demos.

Unfortunately it’s currently bricked following a failed BIOS update. The existing K6-2 has to be underclocked to avoid overheating and I wanted to fit a K6-2+ instead. The mobo doesn’t support these but I found a custom BIOS image that claimed to do the job. Either it was bad or I screwed up. Tyan say they will re-flash the BIOS chip for a nominal cost. It’s been on my todo list for a couple of years now…

Wow..I just got one myself tonight (also here in Vancouver). However, I paid $40CDN for it but I think it is well worth it. It will join my other collection of retro compuers such as OsborneI, AppleII and Commodore PET2001.

I frequent FreeGeek but never had seen any like that. However I picked up old Commodore Amigas.

I makes me crinch when I see people just throw them now into the rcycle bin (being a Govt very big initiative). It is getting harder now to find old retro comoputers.